Mail is now but the medium of bills and spam. Messengers are the new mail and some people write very long messages indeed. The need to trust your provider remains but at least the cryptography seems to be solved, I hope? Or close to? I use Threema because it is not tied to a phone number, or WhatsApp as my fallback. Not ideal, but better than email.

I ran an email server on a Raspberry Pi for a while and decided to abandon this. The setup of Sendmail or Postfix, Dovecot, SPF1, DKIM, Greylisting, TLS, Spam Assassin, the updates, the issues around certificates, it was a lot of work and in the end I wondered what I was defending against. I feared that my most likely enemy would be common criminals and in that case, relying on Gmail is definitely safer.

You could say that snail mail just the same: bills and spam. And you’d be making my point. I write about two handwritten letters a year to my sister. Everything else is bills and spam. All the banks and insurances and other services I know want to move their billing online, that is to say, to email. Little do they know that half their bills are classified as spam. Not only does my email account get sent bills I don’t want to read, the bills I need, the bills I need to pay, I fetch them from the garbage dump of humanity, the Junk and Spam folder. Sad!

In short, email is the new snail mail. And messaging is the new mail. How do I write love messages to my wife? How do people congratulate her on her birthday? How are pictures shared with the family? It’s all messengers. Some are on Threema, some on WhatsApp, some on Facebook Messenger, maybe some are on Signal, but I definitely know that my wife only reads her email once a week or less. Too much spam. Too many newsletters. To much noise. Nobody she cares about reads email.

Comments

What is the difference between Email and a messenger except for the content? Isn’t Email much more versatile? Isn’t it just like being able to send a WhatsApp to Threema and vice versa?

– Stefan 2017-03-19 16:16 UTC

Email is insecure in transit unless you use end to end encryption. The popular messengers all added end to end encryption.

– Alex Schroeder 2017-03-19 16:37 UTC

So it’s a security issue? I’d say that the vast majority of the users of a messenger do not care about security. Otherwise WhatsApp would never have become that popular.

My guess is rather that messengers have become so popular because of the way conversations are displayed. While mails are displayed more or less chronologically, messengers achieve a more natural feeling to a conversation. Furthermore, mails still feel more letter like. This demands a more formal style than the short messenger messages.

– Stefan 2017-03-19 18:40 UTC

Oh, absolutely. My only argument is that there is no point adding encryption to mail anymore because nobody wants to read it anyway.

Perhaps that means companies wanting to send secure email might want to invest in encryption. But what they are doing instead is sending emails and telling you that you can pick up the actual “mail” in your “inbox” which lives on their website. Thus, they are in fact leveraging HTTPS to secure their “email” in transit.

There is also the property of the email system that it’s the internet’s ultimate method of authentication/identification. If I can access your email, I can reset all of your passwords, use 2FA, etc. I’ve got a feeling, as time goes on, email accounts will turn into largely unused “master accounts” and providers will have a lot of responsibility to maintain a secure service. You could argue we’re at this point already.

– Tom 2017-03-22 18:12 UTC

Indeed. “My 2FA is the forgot my password link.”

– Alex Schroeder 2017-03-23 12:14 UTC

Oops! “WhatsApp Business is an Android app which is free to download, and was built with the small business owner in mind. With the app, businesses can interact with customers easily by using tools to automate, sort, and quickly respond to messages.”

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